Honor and Duty (21 page)

“Hey, Lucky,” I said.

“Hey,” he managed, thickly.

Lucky’s tongue ran over his ripped lip. “Yo’ daddy has a gun. I want it, bad. Jus’ one time, man.” His shoulders quaked and he looked away, quickly swabbing his eyes with a forearm.

I looked away. I felt sorry for him. It wasn’t the first time.

“He gonna kill my momma,” Lucky said. “Gotta stop that sonofabitch. He gonna git her when she come home tonight. Gimme yo’ daddy’s gun, China. I gotta shoot ’im ta stop ’im.”

Titus B., Markie T., and Alvin Sharpes had joined in. I didn’t know what to say. I shook my head, violently. I wasn’t allowed to have my elbows on the table—how the heck was he going to get away with shooting his daddy? My face showed my doubts.

“Oh, man!” moaned Lucky.

“Yo’ daddy’s gun
work?
” asked Titus. “It’s not all rusted up?”

I nodded, then shook my head.

“Then let Lucky use it, chump!”

“Fergit it!” said Markie T. “We ain’t killin’
nobody.
” Markie was like Toussaint—a peacemaker.

“What do I do, Toos?” I asked, panic in my voice. They didn’t ask me for much—to play skins on a cold day or to retrieve
long-hit balls over a fence—I didn’t mind. Saying no could be
ji hui
, bad luck, and take from me the acceptance I had earned. I didn’t want to be
k’ung hsu
, abandoned, again.

“Gonna tell you again, Lucky,” said Toos. “Pack yo’ bags and
git.
Tell yo’ momma to meet at my place. Momma’ll know what to do. May have to crash with us. Maybe at the church. But don’t go back there with no
gun.
”

“Toos,” said Lucky, his low voice gravelly, “he gonna kill us. He like a dog who can track. He find us! He find us at yo’ place, he kill you
and
yo’ momma. At the church, he kill the Rev’rend.”

He looked at Toos, his left eye a bolus of red meat. “Help me, man.” He pointed at me with an arm that was shadowed in darkening bruises. “Git ’im ta gimme his daddy’s gun! Can’t kill ’im wif my hands. I pull a knife, he’ll cut me till I’m dead.”

“Gun’s no better than a knife, Lucky,” said Toos. “Besides, I know Mr. Ting. He ain’t
never
gonna let us do this. Lucky, you ain’t gonna make this boy
steal
from his own daddy. Mr. Ting ain’t gonna help you kill Leo.”

I nodded. Yes, that was the right thing to say.

“An’ I ain’t either,” said Mark T. softly. “Ain’t the answer.”

“Then I gonna die!” Lucky cried, his face in anguish.

“My momma,” said Toos, “told me that Leo Washington’s gonna die by his own hand. An’ that’s what’s gonna be. No guns.”

“Poison the mothafucka,” said Titus B. in his hard, high voice. “Put roach and rat poison in his drink. Leo, he like Sippy—he drink
anything.
Lucky, don’t he drink after he beat you?”

Lucky nodded. “Red plum wine,” he said.

“You gotta let him hit you, Jerome,” said Titus. “It gonna hurt like a bitch, your eye all fucked up. Hell, you could lose it. But then you know he take his slug, and you know what be
in
it.” He looked at Toos. I worked my mouth, which was dry.

“Let’s get Hector Pueblo an’ them to help,” I squeaked.

“No way!” spat Lucky. “No growed man gonna cotton ta helpin’ kids kill. Hector, he’s cool, but he go pop his muscles in fronta my daddy an’ that’ll be the end a
me!
That’s
suicide!
”

“You know, Hector, he’d say this is wrong,” said Alvin Sharpes. “I gotta tell you straight. My daddy, he’d think this is bad shit, and
not
to be done.” Everyone looked up to Mr.
Sharpes. He drove a Muni rail car and didn’t drink. There was silence.

“Dead on, Alvin Sharpes,” said Toos. “Lucky, don’ try killin’ yo’ daddy, even if he be Leo Washington. Get yo’ momma outa town. He won’t follow. He’ll find someone else to beat on close by. He’s too lazy to chase.”

“Toussaint,” said Lucky, “he track down his firs’ wife and baby girl and
killed
them
dead!
They was in Atlanta, and she run from him and he caught ’em in
De-troit.
Sometime he hit my momma he call her the same name, an that firs’ woman, she’s
dead.
”

“Okay, Lucky,” said Toos, “I help you run. But God tol’ Moses to say ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ an’ I lissen to that.
You
lissen to that.”

Alvin Sharpes said, “Amen to that.”

“Don’ be using the Book on him!” shouted Titus, his rasping voice cracking with emphasis. “Tha’s fo’
grown-up
people, an’
prob’ly
for grown-up
white
people. God don’ give a
shit
’bout us. We’s goin’ up against
Leo.
It’s be David an’ that big shit-kickin’ black nigga mothafucka
Go-liath!
Toos, you’s
all
wrong ’bout this. Lookit here—Lucky’s got
no
room to move—
no
room, man! Man, all he askin’ for is a
slingshot
to go up against
Leo!
” He paced, raising clouds of fine red dust from the trail as Toos, Markie, and Alvin Sharpes argued with Titus.

I didn’t want to hear it—not about beatings, or killings, or guns, or the Good Book. Where were the men? Where was Uncle Shim’s
changgiao t’ungchih
—rule by elders? Where was a place where this didn’t happen? This was the biggest trouble since Leo knifed Mathey Roache, back when Mathey had just returned from the Korean War and I had cried when I saw Leo throw Lucky’s momma down the hard stairs into the street. I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to jump a freight with Toos. This didn’t happen in the Hanlin Kuan, in the Pen Forest. We shouldn’t have to hope for God to avoid murder. I had to do something, to stop this bitter, bad luck talk.

“I can call the po-lice,” I said.

“Oh, shit—screw them!” hissed Lucky. “They won’t do
nuthin’.
Figger it’s a man’s right, beat his wife.”

We were quiet for a moment. I didn’t know the answer to that. Dave Neumark at the Y was a cop. He wouldn’t let this happen.

“
I
know a cop,” I said, “who don’t think like that.”

They looked at me. Kai Ting from China knows a cop. I was always full of surprises.

“Well,
I
don’t,” said Lucky. “ ’Nuff flappin’ lip. Gonna take Leo down tonight or die tryin’. Gonna keep my momma out of it. You serious, my momma can stay wif you?” he asked Toos. “Or wif you?”

Markie T. nodded. “You got it.” Toos nodded.

“My place, too, if my daddy says okay,” said Alvin Sharpes.

“Don’t mean nothin’,” whispered Toos, hitting Lucky on his arm. Lucky’s uninjured eye blazed with weeping hurt. That’s how it had been for me when I had to fight Lucky, six years back: no way out. I wanted to ask Toos what I should do, but Titus was yelling at Toos and Markie about everyone ganging up on Leo with baseball bats, renewing the argument, and they left, leaving me at the lakeshore.

I stood on the red gravel path, fingering a round rock, wanting to throw it over the moon, wanting to call Dave Neumark and tell him that murder was going to happen. I wanted him to fix things. I remembered that cops had come into the Haight, gone into the wrong apartment and shot the wrong person, seeing no difference between Negro killer and Negro victim.

But Dave Neumark would get it right; he was smart, and worked as a cop volunteer for Barney Lewis, chief of instruction at the Y. Barney was a Negro. Dave Neumark would approach Leo, telling him to be cool. Leo was a bully; he’d smile and make jokes, shake hands and talk about the weather. Later, he’d kill me.

I imagined calling Tony, Barney, or Pinoy. I knew what they’d say: tell your father. Chinese fathers were out of reach. All evening long, I looked at the phone at the Y, and later, I stared at the one in the living room. I touched it, but couldn’t call, stopped by the terror of facing Leo, of imagining Edna while I tried to explain this problem to my father. I knew it wouldn’t save Lucky and would somehow make everything far worse.

I lay in my bed and spoke to Dave Neumark a hundred times, silently, each time telling him more and more about Leo and what he did to his son and wife. I tried to imagine why Leo was this way. I figured his daddy beat him. I imagined a place where kids didn’t have to think so hard.

Leo Washington came home, drank a good portion of a bottle of plum wine, and became ill. He dumped the bottle into a
bowl in the kitchen and found a residue in it. He went looking for Lucky.

In the morning, Momma LaRue and Mrs. Timm found fourteen-year-old Jerome “Lucky” Washington in the hallway outside his door. He had been dead for a while, cut and stabbed beyond the reach of earthly pain, further bad fortune, and the pains of foul
yuing chi.
Leo was in his living room, without wife or son to hamper his wandering ways, his swollen purple tongue filling his gaping mouth, stained by cheap wine vomitus that had choked him to death. Leo had been done in by his own hand.

Was I a killer? Mr. McWalter’s question would not go away.

And so I dreamed of Leo drinking his wine and dying. He would pop his suspenders and belch as the first waves of pain hit, and he would get sick. Or he would be bent over with gut pain, slapping the wood floor with his large hands, retching onto his Big Ben overalls, his big, ugly head down. He would hunt down Lucky with a knife. Lucky, his eye swollen, put his unschooled fists up to his father as he had put them up to me, six years before.

At the end, Leo would always cry, “China boy, you lame little streak a yella chink crap, why didn’t you call the
po-lice?!
I’m dyin’ in my gut an it’s your doin’! You had a phone!”

14

West Point, November 1964

The winter gods smiled on me, shedding
foo chi
, good fortune. I moved to Corps Squad gymnastics training tables in the deep alcove in the center of Washington Hall. I was the worst high-bar man in college athletics, but I ate a nightly supper that would have filled the Trojan horse and the hulls of the Greek fleet. I squirreled food and distributed it to classmates.

“Damn, son,” said Fitz McBay, the Southern traditionalist table com. “You eat like a starvin’ potbellied pig!”

The presidential election consumed the front pages of
The New York Times.
Johnson ran on a platform of rationality and peace, and painted Senator Goldwater of Arizona as a militaristic warmonger. The President announced that he would not send “American boys to fight a war that ought to be fought by Asian boys.”

There were four other Asians in the Class of 1968.

“I guess,” I said to Mike Benjamin during the bonfire rally before the Navy game, “he’s just going to send me and the other four Asians to Vietnam, so you don’t have to go.”

“Mighty white of you,” said Arch Torres, a classmate from New Mexico who was a better boxer than I.

“Thanks, buddy!” said Bob Lorbus as he thumped me on my chest hard enough to evacuate my air, while Joey Rensler whacked my back, exclaiming, “Yeah, outstandin’!”

“Anytime,” I squeaked.

On November 3, Lyndon Johnson would defeat Barry Goldwater and remain in the White House. Robert Francis Kennedy would be elected senator from New York. Both would draw 90 percent of the black vote. I couldn’t vote, and I wasn’t black, but I felt I was part of it, even if I ended up being one of a tiny minority of Asian-American soldiers who were going to be sent to Vietnam so white boys wouldn’t have to go.

But the larger event, by far, in the historic month of November 1964 was the 74th Army-Navy Game in Veterans Memorial Stadium, Philadelphia. The Army team, three-touchdown underdogs, had defeated the highly touted Navy squad with stout defense and blitzes. Army’s Rollie Stichweh, the unsung star quarterback, had outplayed Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach. The Corps, the Army team’s “twelfth man,” had willed victory through our demented screams led by Marco Matteo Fideli. It had helped that the team was rich in defensive talent and coached by Paul Dietzel, one of the country’s best coaches. Army had the tradition. Red Blaik had defined Army football of the twentieth century, and college football of the forties and fifties. Vince Lombardi had been an assistant coach, and now everyone was excited about a big, bluff line coach named Bill Parcells, whose brother was on the team.

The buses returned from Philadelphia on November 28, 1964, and the band played, chapel bells pealed, faculty and
staff families honked car horns, and everyone, throats stripped raw from hours of screaming, once again sang “On Brave Old Army Team” as if it were the new national anthem. It felt as if we had won World War II, singing for all that was good, all our suffering as cadets redeemed by a game that represented so much more than a pigskin in fall.

I, a basketball player who had never mastered football, had become an uncompromising football fanatic. The season had absorbed our personas, suspended our cares. I answered Marco Fideli’s spirited cheers as if they were calls from Odin, the Norse high god, to whom Plebes prayed in long, haunting chants, for parade-canceling thunderstorms. I donated my
yuing chi
, my fortune, and my
yeh
, karma, to all the Scandinavian and Chinese gods. I offered my few good credits in return for first downs or enemy punts. Just let us get one touchdown here, on
this
drive, and I’ll expect nothing else of my life, I whispered amidst the roar of the Corps. The Army victory over Navy had been an answer to prayers, more significant than our march across the Plain to join our companies at the end of Beast. The victory in 1964 had ended Navy’s stunning ability, in six consecutive years, to hand talented Army teams bitter defeats in Philadelphia. The curse had ended, and we were to share in riches beyond measure.